Tag: movies

Thoroughly Modern Marple

I just read that Jennifer Garner (of Alias fame) has been cast as Miss Marple in new Disney film.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Agatha Christie’s books, Jane Marple is supposed to be an elderly spinster who lives in the small English village of St. Mary Mead.  Apparently Disney, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to ‘reboot’ the Miss Marple franchise by turning her into a hot thirtysomething.

This takes the cake for the most absurd thing I’ve read today.  When one thinks of Miss Marple, one thinks of George Orwell’s old maids bicycling to Holy Communion, not someone who could appear on the cover of Maxim.  Miss Marple’s sublime ordinariness is part of her charm.  She’s not a high-powered secret agent, she’s just a run-of-the-mill English lady who happens to have a gift for piecing clues together.

At first I thought this was going to be a prequel, but then I read that it’s going to be set in the modern day.  So not only are they shaving decades off of Miss Marple’s age, they’re also catapulting her decades into the future.  It looks like Disney’s just trying to cash in on the Marple name, but I have to wonder if that’s a winning strategy.  Presumably, the changes they’ve made are designed to appeal to a younger demographic, but I doubt that many people under the age of 50 know who she is.  And the people who already do know who she is probably won’t care much for the changes they’ve made.

Since this is a Disney film, we probably won’t be forced to watch New Marple thrash around in bed with some buff boytoy.  Nor will she be called upon to solve a disgustingly gruesome crime.   For that we should be thankful.  The Miss Marple stories were never about gritty, realistic dramas.  They were the coziest of the cozy mysteries.

Sigh.  I wonder how long it will be before Justin Bieber is cast as a young Brother Cadfael?

The Last Airbender

I’m going to cut to the chase: The Last Airbender is a terrible, terrible movie.  M. Night Shyamalan has taken one of my favorite TV shows of all time and turned it into a plodding, humorless piece of crap that still haunts me more than a week after leaving the theater.

I confess that The Physicist and I did not enter the theater with high expectations.  Almost from the moment we heard about the movie, we had cause to worry.  M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t exactly have a track record of recent box office successes, and we were a bit worried by his decision to condense an entire season’s worth of material into a two hour movie.  Right before we actually saw the movie, we were bombarded with a string of negative reviews. Now I’m not one to pay much attention to the critics, but the sheer unanimity of their condemnation gave me pause.  Now that I’ve seen the movie, I can safely say that the critics were absolutely right.

For starters, unless you’ve already seen the TV show, the plot is going to be pretty much nonsensical.  Actually, I think I’m being generous by using the word ‘plot.’  It’s really more of a series of random vignettes strung together by awkward expository dialog.  I suspect that M. Night Shyamalan had good intentions: he probably wanted to remain as true as possible to the TV series. But, in his quest to shoehorn in as many facts as possible, he resorts to an irritating amount of bland narration, making one wonder if they are watching a movie or listening to a really bad audiobook.

In fairness, the narration isn’t much worse than the rest of the acting.  I don’t know what kind of direction Shyamalan gave the actors, but it seems as if he told everyone to read their lines as if they’d been heavily sedated.  The result is that Aang, who should be a happy-go-lucky kid, seems clinically depressed.  And Sokka, who should be the sarcastic comic relief, spends the whole movie being furrowed and angsty.

The only character whose behavior resembled that of their cartoon counterpart was Prince Zuko.  Dev Patel did a nice job of capturing the character’s testiness without resorting to scenery-chewing.

Even worse, the actors managed to mispronounce characters’ names on a number of occasions.  If you’re a loyal viewer of the series, the result is akin to nails on a chalkboard.

In defense of the actors, even Sir Laurence Olivier would’ve had trouble turning in a decent performance with the sort of insipid dialog that abounds in The Last Airbender. In addition to the bland narration, there are a number of lines that make you laugh for all the wrong reasons (“We need to make them believe that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in theirs.”).

But perhaps the biggest travesty of The Last Airbender is that none of the humor that made the series so enjoyable shows up on the silver screen.  It’s like the whole movie is one big Very Special Episode.

The Last Airbender is the first part of a trilogy.  Sadly, Shyamalan is currently on track to write and direct the other two films.  If Nickelodeon has any sense, they’ll replace him.  Otherwise, he’ll have singlehandedly ruined one of their greatest franchises.

FINAL GRADE: F

Ancient Egypt on the silver screen

I read today that Will Smith is planning to make a movie entitled The Last Pharaoh.  The title seems to be a bit of a misnomer since the movie is about Taharqa, one of the Nubian kings who ruled over Egypt during the Third Intermediate Period.  There’s really no way you can claim he was the last pharaoh.  In fact, he wasn’t even the last pharaoh of his own dynasty.

Apparently, Smith has hired Randall Wallace to write the screenplay.  Wallace has written screenplays for a number of historical epics, such as Braveheart, Pearl Harbor, and The Man in the Iron Mask. Interestingly, Wallace was also involved in writing  the computer game Titan Quest (quite frankly, given the game’s paper-thin storyline, he should probably leave that off his resume!).  While Wallace isn’t exactly known for his scrupulous historical accuracy, he does at least write entertaining screenplays.  That gives me hope that The Last Pharaoh might at least be enjoyable, even if it is bastardized history.

Oddly enough, ancient Egypt hasn’t been well served on the silver screen.  I’m trying to think of a truly good movie about ancient Egypt and I’m coming up blank.  Usually films about Egypt are undermined by a fatal combination of hackneyed story ideas and historical inaccuracies that make Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth look like a scholarly monograph.  Which is a shame, really, because Egyptian culture is rich with ideas for good movies beyond the tired revived mummy trope.

Alice in Blunderland

Tonight the Physicist and I went to see Alice in Wonderland.  Being a huge Tim Burton fan, I’d been looking forward to seeing it.  Alas, we both left the theater feeling disappointed.

Visually, the movie is great.  The special effects are wonderful and they really bring the world alive, even when watching it in 2D.  Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter are great as the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen respectively.

But good special effects and two good performances can’t make up for a lousy plot.  The scriptwriters tried to cram way too much in and, as a result, everything just feels rushed.  The writers also decided to shoehorn in elements of Lewis Carroll’s famous poem “The Jabberwocky.”  I suspect this was done in order to sex things up with a bit of action, but it ends up being one more thing in an already convoluted mess.

Depp and Bonham-Carter aside, the acting isn’t all that great.  Mia Wasikowska’s Alice is wooden and lacks charisma.  The White Queen, played by Anne Hathaway, is just annoying with her constant vapid fluttering.

The final strike against this movie is the ending.  It’s nothing more than a cliche-ridden attempt to turn this into a Girl Power film.  This is even more frustrating because, if the film had ended a scene or two earlier, it would’ve been a much stronger ending.

FINAL GRADE: C